The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance

by Josh Waitzkin

As I cultivated openness to these connections, my life became flooded with intense learning experiences.

After several years of cloudiness, I was flying free, devouring information, completely in love with learning.

I felt as though I had transferred the essence of my chess understanding into my Tai Chi practice.

Upanishadic essence, Taoist receptivity, Neo-Confucian principle, Buddhist nonduality, and the Platonic forms all seemed to be a bizarre cross-cultural trace of what I was searching for.

I had to come to a deeper sense of concepts like essence, quality, principle, intuition, and wisdom

I sometimes refer to it as the study of numbers to leave numbers, or form to leave form.

but over time the intuition learns to integrate more and more principles into a sense of flow.

Eventually the foundation is so deeply internalized that it is no longer consciously considered, but is lived.

Whenever there was a concept or learning technique that I related to in a manner too abstract to convey, I forced myself to break it down into the incremental steps with which I got there.

all diamonds in the rough, brilliant, beat men, lives in shambles, aflame with a passion for chess.

The vast majority of motivated people, young and old, make terrible mistakes in their approach to learning.

Dweck, a leading researcher in the field of developmental psychology, makes the distinction between entity and incremental theories of intelligence.

So the boy figures he’s good at math and bad at English, and what’s more, he links success and failure to ingrained ability.

Learning theorists, on the other hand, are given feedback that is more process-oriented.